5 Best Thursday Columns

Doyle McManus on
China's 'Green' Economy Although the rising superpower has pledged a
new "green" agenda, those promises ring hollow as the nation becomes one
of the world's major polluters and its cities turn "gray," explains
Doyle McManus at The Los Angeles Times. China has "amazingly"
inefficient energy use, consuming 20 percent of the world's energy, while producing 8 percent of the
world's economic product. "Air
pollution is getting steadily worse, and water pollution is a major
crisis as well. China burns more coal (by far) and emits more greenhouse
gases than any other country," reports McManus. While it's nice that
the country is now at least making overtures to becoming more "green,"
it would " be even nicer if China delivers."

Matt Miller on What Obamanomics Lacks The president should use the
departure of Larry Summers to add some new blood to his economic policy
team, argues
the Washington Post columnist. Right now America's economy is caught up
in a "race between innovation and calcification--between the power of
new ideas to lower costs and boost quality, and the power of entrenched
interests to protect their habits and incomes." It helps, Millers says, to see "America as a set of 'industrial complexes'"--including
the "K-12 Industrial Complex, which leaves us spending more than other
wealthy nations, even as we're stuck in the middle (or worse) on
international tests." To "break this fatal interest-group
stranglehold," we need to "promote entrepreneurial innovation and
harness capitalism's bottomless capacity for finding new ways to
deliver more for less." Instead, Obama has been "sprinkl[ing] a few
more Pell grants," which colleges simply "transform ... into higher
tuition."

Bret Stephens on Breakfast With Ahmadinejad The Wall Street Journal columnist writes
that the Iranian president had the media going in circles during a
recent breakfast in Manhattan. From the breakfast fare (bagels
and lox) to his "flawlessly delivered lies" in response to softball
questions, Stephens writes Ahmadinejad seemed intent on testing the
limits of the media's obsequiousness. He also delivers an interesting obervation:

Perhaps I haven't achieved the appropriate degree of jadedness, but my
own impression of Ahmadinejad was that he was easily the smartest guy
in the room. He mocked us in a way we scarcely had the wit to
recognize. We belittle him at our peril.

Katrina Trinko on Why Early Education Fails to Deliver California may
become the next state to launch a pre-kindergarten early-education
curriculum for students, and while the idea seems "harmless enough," it
will mostly likely fail to deliver any long-term educational benefits, figures
The National Review's Katrina Trinko. "If Californians introduce
transitional kindergarten, they might provide a great free day care for
parents, but they're kidding themselves if they expect any higher test
scores in the future," she contends. And once the education initiative
is in place (which costs about $700 million a year in dollars that
would have been returned to the general fund), it's very hard to cut
such programs. Oklahoma and Georgia have similar pre-k education systems
and they have failed to discontinue them even after they have displayed little
tangible benefits to student's long-term growth.

Parvez Sharma on the Hypocrisy of Bollywood Elite The Guardian columnist glances
at a series of tweets by "Bollywood's biggest star" Amitabh Bachchan
and doesn't like what he sees. Apparently Bachchan was at a birthday
party for another prominent Indian and tweeted about a "birthday cake
designed as a slum" (picture here).
This type of cavalier attitude toward the Indian poor was more than
"appalling" to Sharma. He argues: "I wonder if the irony was lost on
most of the Bollywood elite, who dutifully showed up and no doubt ate
big chunks from the makeshift huts and open sewage drains. I wonder, if
they are aware of India's latest poverty statistics. I am sure the cake,
like the rest of the food on offer, was delicious." Another irony:
"Some of these very same elites had been up in arms against what many
activists called the 'poverty porn' of Danny Boyle's film, Slumdog
Millionaire."